


to the clear northern sky

by The_Wavesinger



Series: upon this rock [1]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Conquest, Gen, Other, Post-The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, War, blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance of Peter/Oreius
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 20:54:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30145476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/pseuds/The_Wavesinger
Summary: Peter gives his whole heart to Narnia, and she in turn offers up her blood-stained love.(Or, Peter, the North, and conquest of the Ettins.)
Relationships: Peter Pevensie & Narnia, Peter Pevensie/Narnia
Series: upon this rock [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2218752
Kudos: 9





	to the clear northern sky

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically bookverse with a few film concepts woven in.
> 
> [(I made a quick banner on Tumblr)](https://the-wavesinger.tumblr.com/post/646130389789851648/to-the-clear-northern-sky-by-thewavesinger-peter)

i.

Those first desperate years, the Giants are quiet; Peter will count it as a blessing, later.

He rides north with Oreius anyway.

It’s just the two of them, swords and shields strapped to their backs. They eat from the fruits of trees whose dryads flit away the moment they’re seen, and drink from fresh streams guarded by naiads and minor river-gods who shyly make obeisance or ignore them altogether. Talking Beasts dart around with awe shining in their eyes, but they don’t stop to greet Peter like they would have near Cair Paravel.

Narnia loves her High King; Narnia will always love her High King. But here, further north, deepest in Jadis’ kingdom and yet the least touched by the ravages of her Long Winter, Narnia is gossamer-threaded and blushing, reaching for him but still elusive.

A creature of the White Witch sets upon them. Peter and Oreius fight, back to back in a familiar waltz. Narnia cleans his sword and accepts his and the creature’s blood, intermingled, drinking of it thirstily, but she shies away from his whispered reassurances, skittish as a new-born foal.

Narnia loves her High King, but in the North, she does not yet know him.

And yet she guides their feet until they come at last to the wild country, to the home of the Giants, to the place of the Ettins who marched with the White Witch.

ii.

These lands are not Narnia. That deep hum that’s wound around his ribs, settled stretched under his skin, is gone, and there is silence.

Or, not quite silence. He can still feel the fingers of the earth, of the people who walked here and will walk here, reach up to him and hold him in their grasp. But here, there is no Narnia to translate that strange language. He loves as he always does, gives his heart and promises away, his sword and his shield and his service, but he doesn’t _understand_.

He and Oreius lie entangled together on the hard ground. The kisses and touches they share settle into warm awareness, and Oreius whispers to him the secrets of the magics of Narnia, held close by Centaurs since the dawn of time, now given to him, a gift from General to King. Under a deep blue sky speckled with stars, silver and gold and red and threaded through in constellations so unlike those back in England, Peter accepts that gift and draws it into his heart.

iii.

There are great ruins here.

They tower above him, grey and foreboding, their shapes casting dark shadow-bruises across broken, empty earth, looming pillars grazing open skies. Stone crumbles beneath his fingers as he touches it. Things too big for him to comprehend lie shattered into dust.

“This was where the Ettins dwelt, once, sire,” Oreius says.

_The Ettins._

Peter killed a Giant, he thinks, in that first desperate battle that, even now, he can’t dwell on too much. They are a live people still, though quieter these days. These lands shouldn’t be empty, then, but they are, and silence is deafening, not even shattered by bird-calls. It feels like a graveyard.

Or not even a graveyard. He cannot feel the voices of the restless dead yearning for protection he can’t give anymore. There is just an absence of life such as he has never felt in Narnia, true quiet such as he hasn’t felt since he stepped through the wardrobe.

The stone has been carved into stories too big to see by delicate hands; there are large chalices and faded paintings taller and wider than Peter and even tattered scraps of cloth, things that should have long crumbled in a city this old but still, by some miracle, remain. A people lived here, once, and now—

A breeze blows through the stone castle they stand in. Peter shivers.

It’s cold, colder than the winters in Narnia since the first one, and he draws his cloak about him tighter. Chill fingers creep across his throat, gripping tight. For a moment, the land seems veiled in darkness, frozen statue-like, caught in whatever ruin befell this place.

Then he looks up. The sky is calm and clear and blue. He takes a breath.

The shadows don’t go away, a strange sorrow, but the skies, Narnia’s even as they are the Ettins’, steadies him.

_This is who you will be, some day,_ he thinks, unbidden. The flash of some foresight makes the fine hairs at the nape of his neck stand up. But he is High King Peter who has a country and a people to protect and so he puts the foolish sentimentalities aside.

iv.

Ettinsblood stains the soil of Narnia.

The Witch’s soldiers and the Narnians who were killed by them and the Narnians who killed them all fall to the earth, clutching their memories and hopes and fear tight even in death, and the ground sings of them.

Fresh green shoots burst into colour and fade away with the turn of seasons, and the echoes of the Narnians who died belong always to the earth, but the land where the Ettins died remains bare, year after year. He can feel the raw, stabbing ache when he steps on that soil, a jangling, discordant rattle that jars his bones and makes his teeth chatter.

And yet he walks there. Ever an eye on the north, ever with his sword at ready, but he walks there. The High King loves Narnia as deeply and fiercely as she loves him, after all.

v.

The Giants attack, skirmish and pillage on the northern borders. Peter remembers the ruins of a once-glorious kingdom and thinks, _this was inevitable_.

It’s almost with a sense of relief that he dons his armour and rides out. War, at least, he understands. Whether or not he wants to, he understands.

vi.

In the North, in this wild country that he names Ettinsmoor, Narnians hurt and die with the Ettins. Their bloods run intermingled into the thirsty soil, his and his people’s and his enemies, and he can feel that _uneaseangerstrangeness_ when his own wounds drip red. This country aches for long-forgotten wars; some strange magic not the White Witch’s permeates it, and the cry for flesh and blood never stops. He’d go mad, surrounded by these voices, he thinks, if he could only understand them.

But this isn’t Narnia. He loves, but does not understand this blood-soaked land and its people. He stands watch as implacable as the sky above them, and feels each hurt and each jagged cut, but does not understand.

(They will take this land into Narnia eventually. And then—

But that is the Deep Magic, and older magic still, and Peter is one human king. He does not think about the _thens_ for which he has no answers. He cannot.)

vii.

Peter doesn’t meet the leader of the Giants until they’re soundly defeated and petition for peace.

There are others to do the negotiating, he’s never been good at that part, but he rides out to meet her, to talk to her, at a pre-designated place, a hastily erected tent shaded by the firs that grow, if sparsely, here.

The Ettins’ leader is a woman, barely older than him. She doesn’t call herself Queen, but it’s there in her bearing, in the way she speaks for her people, the gravity and sorrow and loss in her eyes, the dark blood-stains across her knuckles.

“Why?” Peter can’t help but ask.

“I could ask the same of you, High King of Narnia,” she parries. Then, with a strange half-smile, “We were a great people once. We were promised the past, and when we were not given that we thought to take the future with our own might and blood.”

Peter remembers the great stone ruins crumbling into dust, and can’t find anything to say.

(That night, she takes him out to look at the stars. They both wear armour and their fingers dance lightly on the pommels of their swords, but she tells him old stories of the Ettins that once were. The earth beneath them weeps and laughs with the memories, and above them the lights of a thousand worlds glitter and wink, are born and die in sputtering laughter. Behind them, noises of the two camps that they’ve each sword to protect waft on the bone-chilling wind.

Between the clear sky and the hard earth and their people, the two of them sit side by side. Peter thinks that maybe, maybe, he might understand.)

viii.

Back—not home, not ever again, but back where they came from, he runs through meadows and tramps over moors and hikes the woods and nothing feels the same. The heartbeat that had become as familiar to him as his own, the thrum of the live earth, the song of Narnia, partner and subject, his protectorate, is gone.

At last, he begs and pleads with his mother until she gives in, and travels north alone, to the very edges of Scotland where the cold wind from the sea sets his teeth chattering against each other and reddens his nose and ears with the sharp bite of frost.

The sky is clear here, full of stars as London will never be, as Narnia always was, and if he reaches up he can almost touch it. There is no roar of bombers, no screech of fighter jets, not even the low-humming whir of war-planes sometimes heard above Professor Kirke’s estate. Here, it’s just him and the silence.

That night, he sleeps beneath the stars instead of going back to his mum’s friends’ houses, curls up on rough ground the way he’s done so many times before, no matter that this young body is unfamiliar with the press of sharp stones through dirt-stained clothing.

There are echoes, here and everywhere, as if he’s standing on the other side of some mirror, some thick glass wall, his face pressed against it but seeing only shadow and mist. Silence yet echoes, carving their knives into the still places between his ribs. Real or not real, desperate hope or lost truth, what he hears he cannot tell.

It’s not the same.

ix.

The second time ‘round, Narnia feels like home and the blood-soaked battlegrounds of Beruna and the strange cold land of the Giants all at once.

He doesn’t go north.


End file.
